The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic torrents digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. This is wild stuff, so check it out if you've never heard this sort of music before. The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs. 

AGP1-138 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

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AGP142 is the second in a series of transcriptions of the long out-of-print ReR Quarterly, produced by Recommended Records. Released at irregular intervals of no less than three months, the series continued through three volumes of LP releases, before switching to the CD medium for a fourth volume starting in 1994, and then ending in 1997. Each volume except the third consisted of four issues containing a magazine and either an LP or CD of music. A pair of CDs with selected tracks from the first two volumes were released in 1991, but those are now also long out of print. A complete track listing for the series can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReR_Quarterly.

AGP142 is a transcription of the LP from volume 1, issue 2, released in September 1985. The highlights of this issue are an extended live structured improvisation at the Festival of Political Song, in East Berlin in February 1984, by a group called Duck and Cover that includes Henry Cow, Chris Cutler, and Dagmar Krause--all of Henry Cow and the Art Bears--as well as Tom Cora and other musicians. There is also a nice electroacoustic piece by John Oswald. 

It is an excellent pressing in excellent condition, with negligible surface noise or tracking distortion. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the pages from the magazine describing the music on the LP. The scans encompass the four issues of volume 1.

01 - Duck and Cover: Berlin Programme [27:29]
02 - John Oswald: Mystery Tapes I [6:07]
03 - Conrad Bauer: Marzfeber [6:58]
04 - Reportaz: Fluent, Battle-Painter's Song, The Day When Truth Was Not Existed [8:16]
05 - Adrian Mitchell: Stufferation [1:45]

Equipment used for A/D conversion: Lyra Helikon phono cartridge, Linn LP12/Lingo turntable, Linn Ittok tonearm, Audioquest LeoPard tonearm cable, PS Audio PS2 preamplifier, Kimber PBJ interconnect, M-Audio Audiophile USB A/D converter. 

NOTE: To the best of my knowledge, these recordings are not currently available commercially. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP, as I do not wish any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.